Space Empire Elite

Space Empire Elite or SEE is a multi-player strategy door game for Atari STbulletin board systems. In Space Empire Elite, players rule an empire which they expand by purchasing planets or conquering other empires. Players are responsible for maintenance of their military and planets as well as feeding the population and the army. The goal is to become the largest, most powerful empire and remain so for as long as possible.

Like many other BBS door games, SEE is asynchronous[1]; players do not need to play all together at the same time. Gameplay is turn-based, with a set number of turns available to play each day.

One of the key features of later versions of SEE is that the game can be set up for "intergalactic", or inter-BBS, play. In this mode, players on one BBS are part of the same "galaxy" and work more as a team, trying to destroy other BBS "galaxies." According to author Mark Wolf, BBS door games of this type "could be maintained indefinitely, tracking and remembering each player's actions from day to day, across weeks or even months—much like today's popular massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs)."[2]

Radoff says SEE was based on a single-player text game called "Kingdom" for the Commodore 64. Kingdom is a turn-based empire-management game, where you must balance paying for your empire and feeding your people. He wanted SEE to revolve around a similar "tight loop around the resource-based decision[s]." To simple game design he added a multiplayer component so that various players on a BBS could attack one another. These features allowed SEE to offer a "social game experience."[5]

Radoff says he felt that Atari ST BBSes generally lacked good BBS door games, and when SEE was released, many sysops immediately wanted to put it on their systems. Sysops were allowed to try the software for free, but the game wouldn't allow more than 8 players unless the sysops paid a registration fee. Much of the money Radoff earned from Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier later became seed capital which he used to start the company NovaLink.[5]

Jurgen van den Handel later wrote a clone of the game in GFA BASIC, adding new features like inter-BBS play, which made it very popular with sysops. For a time, this "intergalactic" mode became far more popular than the local mode. This revised version of the game was updated and maintained by a succession of authors including Steven P. Reed, Carlis Darby, David Pence, Doc Wynne, David Jones, Dick Pederson, and Rob Magdich. The last known version of the game is v11.37, released in 1996.[6]